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After months of wrangling within the Trump administration, the US is set to leave the Paris Climate Agreement, enabling the President to follow through on one of his most high-profile campaign promises.

As with much in the Trump White House, the details are still sketchy. He may withdraw from the entire UN climate change framework, which would be a very drastic step but could be implemented immediately, or solely exit the Paris Agreement, a process that would take over three years to complete.

Whatever mechanism he chooses, the news is undoubtedly bad in what it augurs for US domestic climate action and its retreat from being a responsible international actor.

As well as helping to corral nearly 200 countries at the 2015 UN climate summit in Paris to adopt an ambitious pledge to limit global temperature rises to well below two degrees, Obama committed the US to reducing its own greenhouse gas emissions by over a quarter by 2025.

Leaving the non-binding Paris Agreement is not the most significant measure Trump has taken to halt progress on tackling climate change. Through a previous executive order, Trump has started the process of rescinding the centre-piece of Obama’s domestic climate policy, the Clean Power Plan, that had forced some coal plants to close. He has already enervated the Environmental Protection Agency, installing an avowed climate sceptic, Scott Pruitt, as its administrator who is focusing budget cuts on climate programmes.

A giant puppet depicting Scott Pruitt Credit:
REUTERS/Mike Theiler

But American leadership, while helpful, is not the only, or even the most important, factor driving global efforts to curb climate change.

Trump is swimming against the tide. There is little chance of a reprieve for old king coal in the US, which is being outcompeted by renewables and shale gas. Even a US coal mining CEO has downplayed the prospect of coal production ever returning to pre-Obama levels.

In 2016, for the first time ever, renewables globally contributed more new power generation capacity than fossil fuels. Businesses are putting their money behind renewables, which last year attracted almost double the investment of fossil fuel power.

Far from costing jobs, as Trump claims, clean energy is increasingly good business. Innovation and scale are leading to dramatic cost reductions: the global cost of wind and solar are estimated to have plummeted by 71 per cent and 83 per cent respectively since 2008. Even without supportive government regulation in the US, the fundamentals favour renewables.

These lower technology costs, together with new low-carbon industrial opportunities and domestic political pressure relating to air pollution, are causing two of the world’s biggest emitters, China and India, to abandon coal in favour of renewables.

China peaked its coal use in 2013. Since then, they have become the world’s biggest solar market and have been poised to adopt America’s climate leadership role in the event of them pulling out of Paris.

Solar panel installation in Wuhan, China. China is now home to two-thirds of the world's solar productionCredit:
Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

Similarly, India has recently announced it won’t build any new coal plants after 2022 and forecasts that renewables will generate 57% of their power by 2027, far exceeding their Paris pledge.

In scaling back climate action, Trump the populist is picking an unpopular policy. A US poll has found that 71% of Americans support staying within the agreement, including 57% of Republicans. So too on this side of the Atlantic, where recent polling has shown two-thirds of the British public want to remain signatories.

There is no doubt that Trump’s decision to leave the Paris Agreement is symbolic of his profoundly irresponsible attitude to his duty to protect our precious natural inheritance for future generations. But climate action has an unstoppable economic and political momentum around the world. Fortunately, Trump’s ability to cause lasting damage will be limited.